Godzilla Rising

I couldn’t get down with Pacific Rim I wanted to, but it was just so lazy and predictable. After getting burned by Pacific Rim, I’ve been extremely cautious about the Godzilla remake, even though a bunch of my nerd friends lost their sh*t over it at Comic-Con after seeing ten seconds—literally just ten seconds—of footage. (Which is exactly what nerds at Comic-Con do and why everyone thought Sucker Punch was going to be good, and that’s why I don’t always trust nerds at Comic-Con.) But the first trailer for the new Godzilla came out and, WHOA, it does look pretty badass.

Godzilla isn’t just a monster—he’s THE monster. They call him the “world destroyer” and Godzilla, more than any other movie monster or alien, has always represented humanity’s greatest subconscious fear that one day, something will come to Earth and punish us for being so horrible. There’s no agenda with Godzilla—no invasion, no colonization, no chance for understanding or advancement. He just shows up and wrecks our sh*t. The end, no mercy. And that’s what I’m digging about this trailer. It’s not just the scope and scale of the destruction (more disaster porn, yay), but the looks on everyone’s faces. That’s what was missing from Pacific Rim. That sense of, “Oh God, the world actually IS ending.”

Directed by Gareth Edwards, who wrote and directed the superb Monsters, and starring a bananas cast featuring Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Lainey, how excited are you that Your Obsession is getting so mainstream?), Elizabeth Olsen, Bryan Cranston, Sallie Hawkins, Ken Watanabe and David Strathairn, Godzilla is getting a sweet spot of a release in mid-May 2014. Maybe it will end up bleak and dour, but for now I’m hoping that this will be the kaiju movie I so badly wanted Pacific Rim to be.